Presidential Succession and Democratic Transitions

Why might presidential succession in partly- and non-democratic regimes render the probability of democratic transition more likely? Many presidential regimes in developing world are highly personalist and their stability depends on the strength of their rulers. Transitions are often initiated and driven by elite splits, and the process of presidential succession triggers these splits and uncertainty along the chain of command. Building upon previous work on liberalizing elections (Howard and Roessler 2006), I find that presidential designated successors lose elections more often than the long-standing incumbents, which increases the probability of democratic change, since the former compete against the pro-democratic opposition in a recent, 1990-2004 period. I also find that the presence of hegemonic parties mitigates these effects.

Flatliners: Ideology and Rational Learning in the Diffusion of the Flat Tax

What factors explain the wave of adoption of the flat tax in Eastern Europe — a policy that was all but unmentionable in the rest of the world? We argue that, once the first few successes were underway, governments with liberal outlooks toward taxation adopted the reform through a process of rational learning: an often-radically new government will tend to adopt the policy based on successful implementation of its neighbors. Our contribution to the literature on the political economy of taxation is threefold. First, we show that, both theoretically and empirically, the existing work on taxation does not apply to the flat tax revolution in the post-communist countries. Second, we take into consideration the need and the difficulty of measuring ideology of Eastern European political parties. Third, we approach the issue of policy diffusion by explicitly modeling the different mechanisms that might underlie the process. We also find that the presence of other market-minded reforms do not predict adoption of the flat tax.

Democracy, development, and career trajectories of former political leaders

One of the obstacles to democratic development is the reluctance of political leaders to leave office. This paper argues that alongside democratic constraints and accountability, leaders’ career concerns — specifically, the possibility of post-tenure careers — is an important factor behind their rotation in office. While literature exists about leaders’ exit and fate, we lack a systematic understanding of their careers and whether former rulers retire, remain in politics, pursue civil service, business, international, or non-profit careers after leaving office. Drawing on the new data on the prior and post-tenure occupations of leaders from 1960–2010, the paper explains how democracy, personal background and the economy influence what ex-leaders can do, and why. In turn, over time the post-tenure careers of prior rulers may strengthen the precedent behind the institutional routinization of the rotation in office norm — an important component of democratic consolidation

What Drives the International Development Agenda? An NLP Analysis of the United Nations General Debate 1970-2016

There is surprisingly little known about agenda setting for international development in the United Nations (UN) despite it having a significant influence on the process and outcomes of development efforts. This paper addresses this shortcoming using a novel approach that applies natural language processing techniques to countries' annual statements in the UN General Debate. Every year UN member states deliver statements during the General Debate on their governments' perspective on major issues in world politics. These speeches provide invaluable information on state preferences on a wide range of issues, including international development, but have largely been overlooked in the study of global politics. This paper identifies the main international development topics that states raise in these speeches between 1970 and 2016, and examine the country-specific drivers of international development rhetoric

Delegating diplomacy: rhetoric across agents in the United Nations General Assembly

When political principals send agents to international organizations (IOs), those agents are often assumed to speak in a single voice. Yet various types of country representatives appear on the international stage including permanent representatives as well as more overtly “political” government officials. We argue that permanent delegates at the United Nations face career incentives that align them with the bureaucracy, setting them apart from political delegates. To that end, they tend to speak more homogeneously than do other types of speakers, while also using relatively more technical, diplomatic rhetoric; and career incentives will make them more reluctant to criticize the UN. In other words, permanent representatives speak more like bureaucratic agents than like political principals. We apply text analytics to study differences across agents’ rhetoric at the UN General Assembly. We demonstrate marked distinctions between the speech of different types of agents, contradictory to conventional assumptions, with implications for our understandings of the interplay between public administration and agency at IOs

What countries select more experienced Leaders? The PolEx measure of political experience

How can we assess which countries select more experienced leaders for the highest oce? There is a wide variation in prior career paths of national leaders within, and even more so between, regime types. Obtaining a truly comparative measure of political experience is therefore a challenge and empirical studies have to rely on proxies instead. We propose PolEx, a measure of political experience that abstracts away from the details of the career paths and generalises based on duration of experience in politics, its quality, and its breadth. We draw on a novel data set of around 2,000 leaders from 1950 to 2017 and use a Bayesian latent variable model to estimate PolEx. We illustrate how the new measure can be used comparatively by addressing the question whether democracies select more experienced leaders. We find that while on average they do, this century the dierence with non-democracies has declined dramatically. Future research may leverage PolEx to investigate the role of prior political experience in, for example, policy-making and crisis management